User guides

What is Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6)?

Internet Protocol Version 6 (IPv6) is the next generation of Internet Protocol that is currently in various stages of deployment on the Internet. It was designed as a replacement for the current version, IPv4.

IPv6 uses 128-bit addresses, so the new address space provides for approximately 340.3 undecillion IP addresses; compared to current IPv4 address space which only supports approximately 4.3 billion addresses.

An IPv6 address is a group of 16-bit hexadecimal values (case sensitive) separated by colons. Example: fe80:0000:0000:0000:0202:b3ff:fe1e:8329

As you can see, the new IPv6 address format is quite different from the IPv4 format.